gcczep
Ever Onward...
Good Times Bad Times Part 3
Led Zeppelin had started as an idea, and was now despised as one. But why did people really hate Led Zeppelin? The rock ’n’ roll of the counterculture had been supposed to change the world and hadn’t. Maybe you blamed Dylan’s motorcycle, maybe you blamed Yoko or Paul or Nixon or the Hells Angels. Now you could blame Led Zeppelin, as “All You Need Is Love” had given way to “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love.” They represented someone’s cynical fantasy of the masses, a coalition of louts and groupies and wasted youths who, come to think of it, probably weren’t even reading rock criticism in the first place. The revolution had failed, and Zeppelin was playing its wake, and cashing in—the amount of money they made was an obsessive topic in coverage of the band (“Led Zeppelin and How They Made 37,000 Dollars in One Night,” blared a 1969 headline). Rock ’n’ roll had once been art for art’s sake, or the world’s sake: now it was just art for money’s sake, and Page & co. didn’t even have the decency to pretend otherwise.
And then Led Zeppelin blew everything up, again. Led Zeppelin III, released in October 1970, opened with “Immigrant Song,” a screeching, pummeling anthem about Viking invaders. The only way “Immigrant Song” could have sounded more like a parody of Led Zeppelin is if it were seven minutes long as opposed to a mere (blessed) two and a half. If you hated Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song” confirmed everything you thought you knew, and you may have stopped listening there.
Led Zeppelin III debuted at No. 1 because it was a Led Zeppelin album, and then sales dropped, because—was it a Led Zeppelin album?
But anyone who didn’t stop there would have been surprised, and seriously confused. Led Zeppelin III was an album of real songs, enormous eclecticism, and startling beauty, and the album’s second side contained the finest collection of unplugged rock music this side of Beggars Banquet. “Gallows Pole” was a reworking of an ancient British ballad that boasted acoustic guitars, mandolin, and banjo, and built to a weird, modal rave-up of charging drums and a lush guitar solo. “That’s the Way” was gorgeous, worthy of inclusion on the Joni Mitchell and Fairport Convention albums the band was listening to with obsessive frequency.
And then there’s “Tangerine,” a song Page had written years earlier that’s probably the prettiest recording Led Zeppelin ever made. The 12-string guitar sparkles, Bonham plays with uncharacteristic sensitivity, and Plant sings Page’s lyrics with a vibrato that’s almost Presleyan (a stylistic departure so striking that one critic speculated it was a guest vocalist). “Tangerine” is one of only a handful of Zeppelin tracks that’s totally perfect, not a second too long, not a note unnecessary or out of place (“Hey Hey What Can I Do,” the phenomenal B-side to “Immigrant Song,” is another, although good luck finding it here—in too-clever-by-half fashion, Led Zeppelin left the best song they’d ever written off an album).
Led Zeppelin III was a shocking musical curveball and remains the strangest album in the band’s catalogue. It debuted at No. 1 because it was a Led Zeppelin album, and then sales dropped, because—was it a Led Zeppelin album? And it still didn’t garner the acclaim the band sought, met with confusion or dismissive contempt by writers who barely seemed to have listened to it. “It would be hard to imagine a popular musical organization that is any more consistently ugly than Led Zeppelin,” the New York Times declared, in the opening sentence of its review. The song remained the same, even when it didn’t at all.
* * *
When victory did finally come for Led Zeppelin it came like everything else had—massively. In November 1971 Led Zeppelin released their fourth album, which bore no title but would soon come to be known as Led Zeppelin IV. It contained the band’s self-styled masterpiece, “Stairway to Heaven,” along with their actual masterpiece, “When the Levee Breaks.” Today Led Zeppelin IV is widely regarded as one of the finest albums ever made (Rolling Stone even liked it!) and has sold nearly 40 million copies. It cemented Led Zeppelin as the biggest band of the post-Beatles era, even if returns afterward were diminishing. 1973’s Houses of the Holy was a very good album that was a step down from the work that preceded it. 1975’s Physical Graffiti was a double album that would have been great had it been a single album. 1976’s Presence just wasn’t very good, and 1979’s In Through the Out Door wasn’t much better.
When John Bonham died in 1980 the band called it quits, but the Led Zeppelin idea endured. When This Is Spinal Tap premiered in 1984, the affectionate resemblance loomed larger than Stonehenge. In 1985 the notorious tell-all biography Hammer of the Gods was published and became as seminal a ninth-grade text as Of Mice and Men, despite the band insisting its tales of occult hijinks and hotel debauchery were grossly exaggerated (although the “Shark episode” Wikipedia entry swims on in infamy). In 1986 a trio of youngsters from New York released an album whose cover bore no small likeness to Led Zeppelin and opened with the drums from “When the Levee Breaks.” The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill was Led Zeppelin for the kids of the people who’d bought Led Zeppelin, and those parents were appropriately appalled.
By the time Led Zeppelin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 they’d faded into archetype, open-shirted lead singers and Les Pauls slung around the knees having long since lost their ability to be thrilling or crass. And the three surviving members of the band have aged remarkably gracefully, with Page taking his rightful place as a public intellectual of the electric guitar, Plant reinventing himself as a Grammy-winning interpreter of high-end Americana, and John Paul Jones enjoying the family life (he’s been with his wife since 1965) while occasionally joining other Zeppelin-ish supergroups. In fact, one of the most impressive achievements of the ex-members of Led Zeppelin is how deftly they’ve each disentangled themselves from Led Zeppelin. But they can’t really, no more than any of us can. That murderous burst of guitar that opened “Good Times Bad Times” did everything it was supposed to, and everything it wasn’t: It changed the world.
Led Zeppelin had started as an idea, and was now despised as one. But why did people really hate Led Zeppelin? The rock ’n’ roll of the counterculture had been supposed to change the world and hadn’t. Maybe you blamed Dylan’s motorcycle, maybe you blamed Yoko or Paul or Nixon or the Hells Angels. Now you could blame Led Zeppelin, as “All You Need Is Love” had given way to “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love.” They represented someone’s cynical fantasy of the masses, a coalition of louts and groupies and wasted youths who, come to think of it, probably weren’t even reading rock criticism in the first place. The revolution had failed, and Zeppelin was playing its wake, and cashing in—the amount of money they made was an obsessive topic in coverage of the band (“Led Zeppelin and How They Made 37,000 Dollars in One Night,” blared a 1969 headline). Rock ’n’ roll had once been art for art’s sake, or the world’s sake: now it was just art for money’s sake, and Page & co. didn’t even have the decency to pretend otherwise.
And then Led Zeppelin blew everything up, again. Led Zeppelin III, released in October 1970, opened with “Immigrant Song,” a screeching, pummeling anthem about Viking invaders. The only way “Immigrant Song” could have sounded more like a parody of Led Zeppelin is if it were seven minutes long as opposed to a mere (blessed) two and a half. If you hated Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song” confirmed everything you thought you knew, and you may have stopped listening there.
Led Zeppelin III debuted at No. 1 because it was a Led Zeppelin album, and then sales dropped, because—was it a Led Zeppelin album?
But anyone who didn’t stop there would have been surprised, and seriously confused. Led Zeppelin III was an album of real songs, enormous eclecticism, and startling beauty, and the album’s second side contained the finest collection of unplugged rock music this side of Beggars Banquet. “Gallows Pole” was a reworking of an ancient British ballad that boasted acoustic guitars, mandolin, and banjo, and built to a weird, modal rave-up of charging drums and a lush guitar solo. “That’s the Way” was gorgeous, worthy of inclusion on the Joni Mitchell and Fairport Convention albums the band was listening to with obsessive frequency.
And then there’s “Tangerine,” a song Page had written years earlier that’s probably the prettiest recording Led Zeppelin ever made. The 12-string guitar sparkles, Bonham plays with uncharacteristic sensitivity, and Plant sings Page’s lyrics with a vibrato that’s almost Presleyan (a stylistic departure so striking that one critic speculated it was a guest vocalist). “Tangerine” is one of only a handful of Zeppelin tracks that’s totally perfect, not a second too long, not a note unnecessary or out of place (“Hey Hey What Can I Do,” the phenomenal B-side to “Immigrant Song,” is another, although good luck finding it here—in too-clever-by-half fashion, Led Zeppelin left the best song they’d ever written off an album).
Led Zeppelin III was a shocking musical curveball and remains the strangest album in the band’s catalogue. It debuted at No. 1 because it was a Led Zeppelin album, and then sales dropped, because—was it a Led Zeppelin album? And it still didn’t garner the acclaim the band sought, met with confusion or dismissive contempt by writers who barely seemed to have listened to it. “It would be hard to imagine a popular musical organization that is any more consistently ugly than Led Zeppelin,” the New York Times declared, in the opening sentence of its review. The song remained the same, even when it didn’t at all.
* * *
When victory did finally come for Led Zeppelin it came like everything else had—massively. In November 1971 Led Zeppelin released their fourth album, which bore no title but would soon come to be known as Led Zeppelin IV. It contained the band’s self-styled masterpiece, “Stairway to Heaven,” along with their actual masterpiece, “When the Levee Breaks.” Today Led Zeppelin IV is widely regarded as one of the finest albums ever made (Rolling Stone even liked it!) and has sold nearly 40 million copies. It cemented Led Zeppelin as the biggest band of the post-Beatles era, even if returns afterward were diminishing. 1973’s Houses of the Holy was a very good album that was a step down from the work that preceded it. 1975’s Physical Graffiti was a double album that would have been great had it been a single album. 1976’s Presence just wasn’t very good, and 1979’s In Through the Out Door wasn’t much better.
When John Bonham died in 1980 the band called it quits, but the Led Zeppelin idea endured. When This Is Spinal Tap premiered in 1984, the affectionate resemblance loomed larger than Stonehenge. In 1985 the notorious tell-all biography Hammer of the Gods was published and became as seminal a ninth-grade text as Of Mice and Men, despite the band insisting its tales of occult hijinks and hotel debauchery were grossly exaggerated (although the “Shark episode” Wikipedia entry swims on in infamy). In 1986 a trio of youngsters from New York released an album whose cover bore no small likeness to Led Zeppelin and opened with the drums from “When the Levee Breaks.” The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill was Led Zeppelin for the kids of the people who’d bought Led Zeppelin, and those parents were appropriately appalled.
By the time Led Zeppelin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 they’d faded into archetype, open-shirted lead singers and Les Pauls slung around the knees having long since lost their ability to be thrilling or crass. And the three surviving members of the band have aged remarkably gracefully, with Page taking his rightful place as a public intellectual of the electric guitar, Plant reinventing himself as a Grammy-winning interpreter of high-end Americana, and John Paul Jones enjoying the family life (he’s been with his wife since 1965) while occasionally joining other Zeppelin-ish supergroups. In fact, one of the most impressive achievements of the ex-members of Led Zeppelin is how deftly they’ve each disentangled themselves from Led Zeppelin. But they can’t really, no more than any of us can. That murderous burst of guitar that opened “Good Times Bad Times” did everything it was supposed to, and everything it wasn’t: It changed the world.